Abortion Complications-See no Evil:

For the Public Health Establishment to arrive at the “abortion is safer than childbirth” dogma, health officials had to isolate any deaths or damage to women from abortion to a very narrow set of circumstances, mostly those which take place on the operating table. If a bad effect doesn’t happen there, isn’t documented as starting there, or happens ten minutes later in the recovery room, it was never recorded on the US Public Health Service Abortion Reporting forms. Officially, the problems therefore don't happen! (Highways could be made to appear very safe if police never patrolled the roads or reported any accidents.)

This see-no-evil tactic shields policy makers from having facts that would allow them to do their job to preserve the common good and maintain general health and welfare. I tried several times in my 24 year career as a legislator to require abortion complication reporting by physicians who actually treated the women, rather than those who aborted them. None of my measures ever passed the state senate.

This whitewashing of abortion safety by the U. S. Public Health Establishment has been achieved by:

Not collecting data: Official public health reporting forms ensure that no links can be made between an earlier legally induced abortion with a later maternal or child death or complication;

Altering the conventional meaning of words: Studies which undermine the abortion safety claim have intentionally been ignored or dismissed.

How Abortion Defenders Miss the Obvious:

Patricia Coleman, PhD, of Bolling Green University noted:

“... the data reported by abortion clinics to state health departments and ultimately to the CDC significantly under-represents abortion morbidity and mortality for several reasons: 1) abortion reporting is not required by federal law and many states do not report abortion-related deaths to the CDC; 2) deaths due to medical and surgical treatments are reported under the complication of the procedure (e.g., infection) rather than the treatment (e.g., induced abortion); 3) most women leave abortion clinics within hours of the procedure and go to hospital emergency rooms if there are complications that may result in death; 4) suicide deaths are rarely, if ever, linked back to abortion in state reporting of death rates; 5) an abortion experience can lead to physical and/or psychological disturbances that increase the likelihood of dying years after the abortion and these indirect abortion-related deaths are not captured at all.” [Source]

Selective Uncovering of Facts:

Despite Justice Henry Blackmun stating in the U. S. Supreme Court decision, Roe v, Wade (1973) which legalized abortion nationwide, that, “The pregnant woman cannot be isolated in her privacy,” U. S. Public Health Officials took precautions to ensure there would be no official public health paper trail that could link legal abortion to medical complications save for a very few.

For example, the official recommended U. S. Public Health Service (USPHS) birth certificate exhibits a marked curiosity for information unrelated to individual induced abortion, including, the exact level of the mother and father’s schooling, their race, source of payment for this delivery, the precise number of cigarettes smoked three months before and during the pregnancy.

However, the USPHS asks only for the total number of pregnancies not resulting in a live birth. They do NOT ask whether the pregnancies were ectopic (tubal) pregnancies, induced abortions or spontaneous abortions. Combining gross numbers of induced abortions, spontaneous abortion and ectopic pregnancies in one reporting box is designed to obscure complications from abortion. Such birth certificates prevent any possible “paper trail” that would document medical, labor or birth problems, deaths, complications or other detrimental outcomes stemming from an earlier induced abortion.

Erasing the Abortion Record:

The U. S. Standard Report of Fetal Death (i.e. miscarriage at 20 weeks or greater) also does not ask about prior separate induced and spontaneous abortions. This is important because if induced and spontaneous abortions are tallied in the same check off box, it is impossible to determine whether a prior legal abortion might have affected a woman’s current or future health status.

The medical literature from other countries implicates legal abortion with a host of medical problems. However, these same problems might not be apparent in the U.S. due to the lack of similar reporting requirements.

Abortion & Drug/Alcohol Abuse:

Researchers using data from the federal government funded National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, reported that:

“Use of alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, and behaviors suggestive of alcohol abuse were examined an average of four years after the target pregnancy among women with prior histories of delivering an unintended pregnancy (n = 535), abortion (n = 213), or those who reported no pregnancies (n = 1144). Controls were instituted for age, race, marital status, income, education, and pre-pregnancy self-esteem and locus of control. Compared to women who carried an unintended first pregnancy to term, those who aborted were significantly more likely to report use of marijuana (odds ratio: 2.0), with the difference in these two groups approaching significance relative to the use of cocaine (odds ratio: 2.49). Women with a history of abortion also reported more frequent drinking than those with a history of unintended birth. With the exception of less frequent drinking, the unintended birth group was not significantly different from the no pregnancy group. Resolution of an unintended pregnancy by abortion was associated with significantly higher rates of subsequent substance use compared to delivering an unintended pregnancy.” [Reardon DC1, Coleman PK, Cougle JR., Substance use associated with unintended pregnancy outcomes in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, Am J Drug Alcohol Abuse. 2004 May;30(2):369-83, PMID: 15230081, PubMed, National Library of Medicine]

Researchers who used public medical records for the entire population of women born in Denmark between 1962 and 1991 who were alive in 1980, were able to link induced abortion and childbirth records to death certificates which our U. S. CDC has made impossible to link. Maternal mortality rates were calculated in association with first pregnancy outcomes for delivery, miscarriage, induced abortion, and induced late abortion.

The study published in 2012, examined records for 463,473 women who:

“... had their first pregnancy between 1980 and 2004, of whom 2,238 died. In nearly all time periods examined, mortality rates associated with miscarriage or abortion of a first pregnancy were higher than those associated with birth. Compared to women who delivered, the age and birth year adjusted cumulative risk of death for women who had a first trimester abortion was significantly higher in all periods examined, from 180 days (OR=1.84; 1.11 <95% CI <3.71) through 10 years (1.39; 1.22 <95% CI <1.61), as was the risk for women who had abortions after 12 weeks from one year (OR=4.31; 2.18 <95% CI <8.54) through 10 years (OR=2.41; 1.56 <95% CI <2.41). For women who miscarried, the risk was significantly higher for cumulative deaths through 4 years (OR=1.75; 1.34 <95% CI <2.27) and at 10 years (OR=1.48; 1.18 <95% CI <1.85). ... Compared to women who delivered, women who had an early or late abortion had significantly higher mortality rates within 1 through 10 years. A lesser effect may also be present relative to miscarriage.” [Reardon DC1, Coleman PK., Short and long term mortality rates associated with first pregnancy outcome: population register based study for Denmark 1980-2004, Med Sci Monit. 2012 Sep;18(9):PH71-6. PMID: 22936199, PubMed, National Library of Medicine]

Breast Cancer & Legal Abortion:

Defenders of Legal Abortion have tried to dismiss, dispute or deny any link between legal abortion and subsequent development of breast cancer. However, as breast cancer rates have increased in certain sub-groups the denials are harder to maintain.

When abortion was first legalized nationwide, abortion defenders pointed to studies from eastern Europe to ensure abortion safety for American women. But when foreign medical studies are cited which cast doubt on abortion safety, the studies are dismissed as not applying to women in the United States.

Dr. Joel Brind, a professor of human biology and endocrinology at Baruch College, City University of New York, has been a thorn in the side of abortionists for decades. His recent March, 2015 article in National Review Online, “Abortion and Breast Cancer: the Stubborn Link Returns,” explains in lay terms why there is a connection, and why some foreign studies may be more persuasive and convincing than ones conducted in the United States. Brind notes:

“A 2014 meta-analysis of 36 studies from mainland China reported a 44 percent overall increase in breast-cancer risk among women who had had an abortion. But the strongest evidence comes from South Asia — India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka — where the typical woman marries young, has several children and breastfeeds them all, and never drinks alcohol or smokes cigarettes. In such populations, where there is little else besides abortion to cause breast cancer, relative risks for abortion average greater than fourfold and as high as twentyfold, according to at least a dozen South Asian studies in the past five years alone.” [http://www.nationalreview.com/article/415140/abortion-and-breast-cancer-stubborn-link-returns-joel-brind]

A broad analysis of both Chinese and American data bases published in 2013 confirmed the link between induced for abortion and breast cancer. The researchers note:

“We searched three English databases (PubMed, ScienceDirect, and Wiley) and three Chinese databases (CNKI, WanFang, and VIP) for studies up to December 2012, supplemented by manual searches. ...”

“A total of 36 articles (two cohort studies and 34 case–control studies) covering 14 provinces in China were included in this review. Compared to people without any history of IA [Induced Abortion], an increased risk of breast cancer was observed among females who had at least one IA (OR = 1.44, 95 % CI 1.29–1.59, I2 = 82.6 %, p\0.001, n = 34). ... The risk increased to 1.76 (95 % CI 1.39–2.22) and 1.89 (95 % CI 1.40–2.55) for people who had at least two IAs and at least three IAs, respectively. Subgroup analyses showed similar results to the primary results. Meta-regression analysis of the included studies found that the association between IA and breast cancer risk attenuated with increasing percent of IA in the control group (b = -0.022, p\0.001).

Conclusion IA is significantly associated with an increased risk of breast cancer among Chinese females, and the risk of breast cancer increases as the number of IA increases. If IA were to be confirmed as a risk factor for breast cancer, high rates of IA in China may contribute to increasing breast cancer rates.”

Abortion, Low Birth Weight & Premature Birth:

The biological link between induced surgical abortion and subsequent problems in later wanted pregnancies for both mother and child (low birth weight and premature delivery) was known to Soviet doctors at least since the 1930‘s, as well as throughout eastern Europe in the 1950’s.

Low birthweight is defined as less than 5 pounds, 8 ounces; premature birth is before 37 weeks of pregnancy. About 1 in every 12 children born in the U. S. is low birthweight (LBW).

While there are a number of factors contributing to premature birth (PB) and low birth weight (LBW), peer review medical research does confirm that induced abortion increases the incidence of both LBW and PB. The Physician’s Committee for Responsible Medicine notes that, “LBW is associated with a significant risk of cerebral palsy, mental retardation, retinopathy, prematurity, bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD), cerebral hemorrhage, deafness, autism, and epilepsy.” [http://pcrm.org/research/resch/mod/birth-defect-statistics]

A 2007 published study which included a researcher at Virginia Commonwealth University found in a study of single births, using data from the United States Collaborative Perinatal Project, that: “Compared with women with no history of abortion, women who had one, two and three or more previous abortions were 2.8 (95% CI 2.48 to 3.07), 4.6 (95% CI 3.94 to 5.46) and 9.5 (95% CI 7.72 to 11.67) times more likely to have LBW, respectively. The risk for PB was also 1.7 (95% CI 1.52 to 1.83), 2.0 (95% CI 1.73 to 2.37) and 3.0 (95% CI 2.47 to 3.70) times higher for women with a history of one, two and three or more previous abortions, respectively.

Conclusion:

Previous abortion is a significant risk factor for LBW and PB, and the risk increases with the increasing number of previous abortions. Practitioners should consider previous abortion as a risk factor for LBW and PB.” [J S Brown, Jr1, T Adera2, S W Masho, Previous abortion and the risk of low birth weight and preterm births, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 2008;62:16-22 doi:10.1136/jech.2006.050369]

Commenting on the study, Time Magazine reported, “The accruing risk, says co-author Tilahun Adera at Virginia Commonwealth University, suggests that termination of pregnancy is a true cause of low birth weight and preterm birth rather than a variable associated with such conditions. ‘It's not just an association,’ he says. ‘The risk of premature birth increases with the increasing number of abortions.’” [Time, 12/18/2007]

There are many additional peer review articles on the topic of abortion complications which go well beyond low birth weight or premature birth. You may contact me at delegatebob@gmail.com for additional articles on abortion complications for women and children in later wanted births, or you can do your own research at PubMed, a service of the U.S. Public Health Service’s National Library of Medicine at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed.

I do not believe that women should be denied the conclusions from these studies which can affect their health, future pregnancy possibilities and the well-being of their children.

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